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Psych professor says Trump is mentally ill, then her records surface

Psych professor says Trump is mentally ill, then her records surface

Diagnosing patients from afar is a pretty tricky business, and one ought to be awfully sure before offering a diagnosis to anyone — especially if the patient is the president, the disease is mental illness, and you’re offering the diagnosis to the general public.

That didn’t stop Bandy Lee, a Yale University psychology professor, from being one of the loudest voices insisting that the president was some sort of narcissistic sociopath with a “mental impairment” who represents a danger to himself and America at large.

Lee is best known as one of 25 mental health professionals who contributed to a book titled — with no small degree of ominousness — “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”

The American Psychiatric Association called the work “tawdry, indulgent, fatuous, tabloid psychiatry” and accused the authors of shirking the Goldwater Rule — a 1973 APA dictum which prohibits mental health professionals from publicly diagnosing individuals they haven’t personally examined. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rule was named after another GOP presidential candidate who many psychiatrists publicly declared was unfit to hold office.)

Lee continued to defend the book, co-authoring a Politico piece in which it was stated that “(w)ithout diagnosing Trump in a specific way, as the Goldwater rule prohibits, it is not only acceptable but vitally necessary to have a public conversation about mental state of our nation’s leader.”

However, it turns out her analysis and/or diagnosis of Trump was missing something: namely, the professional qualifications to actually do so.

According to a piece published earlier this week by Campus Reform, records show that Lee’s physician/surgeon license — necessary to practice psychiatry — lapsed in Connecticut in 2015. Meanwhile, her “controlled substance registration for practitioner” license lapsed in February 2017.

A renewal on both have been pending since then.

When asked about the discrepancy, Lee told Campus Reform that “I need only one license,” although she didn’t specify which license that was or whether she currently had it.

Lee has also deleted her Twitter account, clearly a sign absolutely nothing is up and everything is kosher with her license after all.

Meanwhile, while not mentioning Lee and her cohort by name, the APA seemed to have them in mind in a recent statement they issued regarding the Goldwater Rule.

“We at the APA call for an end to psychiatrists providing professional opinions in the media about public figures whom they have not examined, whether it be on cable news appearances, books, or in social media,” the statement read, according to the Washington Examiner.

“Arm-chair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical.”

Well, at least Ms. Lee doesn’t have to worry about that. After all, if the records of the state of Connecticut are any indication, she’s not even a psychiatrist at the moment.